"What's up Billy?"

"Oh... Not Much at my age!"

I've settled into routine here in Chiang Mai. Basically, it's the same interactions every day. It's good morning to the construction workers pouring concrete outside my door. They're so close I can see the tarry ends of the cigarettes they've ground into the already crumbling foundation.

Then its a stroll down the alley for breakfast -- a tiny kitchen where I see the healer:

The healer is some German dude that lives next to me, apparently he can read minds. My friend Liz, when she was living with Will at this same guesthouse, was bitten by a dog. Or something dog-like. While she was making trips to the clinic and worrying about getting rabies if she was lucky, having a disease named after her if she wasn't, the healer said: "You must have wanted to be bit. It means you are hiding something." So, in other words, he's a new-age asshole: one of these spiritually sensitive and open people who inevitably find -- during a sauna, an herbal face mask, or a mushroom trip -- that all along, they are at the center of the universe, and that all the mystery and wonder of the world fades and dries in the light of ego.

But I too have been unproductive and too self-indulgent here in the last few weeks. It is too easy to sleep-walk through the days here. Routine is a killer. To shake it up, get myself writing more, I was expecting a trip to the Burmese border to do a story on the refugee camps there, a piece on current Burmese politics, but my contact / writer friend left without me. But seeing as he's been unreachable in the past few days, seemingly vanished into the jungle, it might be better that I let him drag himself off like some old Indian chief, rather than jump off the edge with him.

The snake story might be revamped as a written piece, but Austrian tv didn't want to buy it. Anyway, I haven't done any snake charming as of yet, but it should still happen.

The key here has been to balance my time actually seeing this world, and trying to work out of it. If I spend all my time reading Umberto Eco and trying to write, well, I find there's nothing to write about. The days that are so busy with adventures, or conflicts, dilemmas, and frustration where I have only fifteen minutes to write that are the best.

So I'll get back to skipping the light fandango, and take my head away from Foucault's Pendulum for a while -- though I'm thinking of writing my own proudly esoteric and nonsensical post-modern novel called Curly's Yo-Yo in which the Three Stooges unwittingly uncover the secret seal of the Knights of the Templar while researching an ancient cabalistic ritual for one of their routines and are systematically murdered for their knowledge. Think about it: Pie = Pi, and if you factor in Shemp's significance as his percentage of screen time, you find that there are exactly 3.14159 Stooges.

Tit for Tat

Last week I chased down a story about the protests over the Thai -- USA Free Trade Agreement talks that were being held in Chiang Mai. But after chasing down leads, interviewing organizers, flying to Lamphun on my motorbike when I was supposed to go to Lampang, blitzkrieging a story as the internet cafe threatened to pull the plug on me -- I found that I had nobody to sell the story to. Tried a paper or two in the states, but they had, of course, already contracted somebody from Bangkok to write the piece for them. So now I have an unpublished clip.

The guy that helped me out with that story was a British fellow named Peter who showed up at the protest with me with seven bags of chili powder in his pockets to blind the police with, aspirin, and a few packets of vaseline to grease his arms with and to smear on the police helmets to block their vision.

There was no real threat though. We sat in a huddle by the doors of the Sheraton as International negoiators met inside. The cops were surrounding us, but, in the Thai way, they were smiling and chatting with each other, singing along with the protest songs, and even accepting the propoganda that the activists passed out to them -- politely folding the leaflets away. There were some pushing and shoving that we didn't see, and apparently the cops hit some HIV infected that had swum across the river to get into the Sheraton -- but after it was all over, one of the chief cops made the announcement: "we are very sorry if anybody was hurt by the police, and we will pay their medical bills if they were."

Sure they're corrupt, but only in the 200 baht speeding fine kind of way, which they only abashedly accept.

But during my rushing around and this and that, I met an Australian freelancer at a bookstore.

"Hey, so what do you do around here, Gabe?"

"well, I'm uhh, trying to become a writer, like, you know, a journalist"

"Cool, let me ask you something: Do you like snakes?"

Now I'm working for an Austrian TV producer who is doing a bit about a snake charmer in Mae Rim. I am the American student who wants to learn the art of snake handling. The grand master snake charmer, "snakeman," is a stocky little Thai man who does not speak any English -- but it is a wonder to watch him work: handling the snake deftly between his nine graceful fingers. He kisses them, milks the poison from their fangs, and battles a python in a small pool of water on a little stage as an announcer narrates the event through a tinny PA system in broken English. Yes, Thai pop music plays during the show as well.

At some point in the next couple of days I am probably going to be handling a cobra. I'm also going to work on my own story about the experience, with my Auzzie friend, and sell it off in Thailand. For some reason, I have no real fear of snakes. I was right there with them, playing with the python, staring down the cobra, no problem at all. Maybe I should be the next snakeman.

So this is my next few days. Pictures to follow.

Aside from this, I have signed on for three months at a guesthouse in the old city. This was, in retrospect, a very poor choice. Although I get a tv, DVD player, cable, refrigerator, and internet, there is a Thai disco down the street that plays horrible music until 2:30 in the morning, and a construction site right next door that begins work at 8 in the morning, which guarantees that I get no more than five hours of sleep a night. I'll either get used to it or go nocturnal ... and kill, kill, kill.

Back in Chiang Mai -- The Edge of the Abyss

"I was about ready to punch Webster right out, the Evangelical prick. If you don't want me to smoke, just ask me, and I won't smoke. I'm a vegetarian, have been for 20 years, but I'll cook you up a steak if you ask me nice."

This was the Scotsman, nearly chewing off his own tongue as we spoke on his last day in Chiang Mai -- his going away party.

Next to him is Webster, who I can't figure out yet. Hates his family, seems to hate America -- I mean, if you find California to be too hardened, you've been rubbed seriously raw.

"So is the breakfast good at the Blue Diamond, Webster?"

"Yes, it is delightful. I had the fruit salad. It had oranges, apples, bananas..." Long pause, Parker goes into his thousand yard stare. Whatever his demons happen to be, they've nearly incapacitated him. He speaks robotically, his grey eyes caught on some distant object, perhaps calculating, perhaps trying to remember exactly where he was when the bus finally broke down.... "Papaya."

He broke his hip in a motorbike accident and has been confined to his room, demanding pot from his caretakers.

This is the world of the standard Chiang Mai expat that I have re-entered. Everyone has their demons, I've decided. Sometimes its as simple as sex -- when yesterday I saw a morbidly unattractive man, who looked something like fetal alcohol syndrome advanced 50 years, with a very loving and attentive Thai girl, I wasn't surprised. Thai culture doesn't bother too much with aesthetics in that way, he was treating her well, she was happy, something he couldn't get in the west. No problem.

But there are other demons, the ones that are hidden a little deeper in the back of the Irish and English bars mostly. Signs in Chiang Mai such as "do not molest street children" and "we are not an escort service" evidence the degree of the sexpat phenomenon.

Then there are the angry people. The fat black middle-aged American screaming at the attendant in an internet cafe had obviously reached the knot at the end of his rope in the States so he simply lashed it on to Chiang Mai and started back towards the other end.

It is a fascinating place that waffles between being a kind of Bohemian, intellectual refuge, laced with a million excellent used bookstores -- where a variety of translations of Homer can be found, thankfully -- but it is also a stomping ground for the perpetually depraved, those sucking the lees at the bottom of the cask.

On another topic: funny signs!!

I drove by a kennel, pet-sitting kind of place that advertised with a big carefully made and illuminated sign: "your pets are in our custodian!"

Well, can he take them out, please?

So I'll be sticking around this joint for a while. Got myself a wordprocessor and a motorbike, just need a house and a girlfriend and I'm all set.. Though a job would be nice too.


updated my Webshots page -- deciding that Flickr sucks -- so if anyone is interested in some pics: http://community.webshots.com/user/allstargangstabiotch